TCU Neeley Professor Rodney D’Souza joins the Executive Advisory Board for the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers.
August 12, 2021
By Nicholas Ferrandino
Rodney D’Souza, the Davis Family Entrepreneur in Residence and managing director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the TCU Neeley School of Business, has become one of the most recent members of the Executive Advisory Board for the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC). The GCEC extended D’Souza an invitation to join the advisory board after being nominated by several residing members on the committee.
Founded in 1997, the primary mission of the GCEC is to establish the golden standard for entrepreneurship programs for its members as well as all other business schools. What began as an organization localized within the United States has today become a global consortium with members hailing from across the world.
“The academic entrepreneurship community as a whole and the GCEC community in particular is extremely helpful, and always looking for ways to support other folks in their field,” D’Souza said. “Everybody here is looking to see how we can make people succeed.”
The purpose of the GCEC Executive Advisory Board is to evaluate and advise the organization on the best course of action to push the organization’s mission to promote the best practices for entrepreneurship programs for universities across the world. The advisory board hosts meetings frequently throughout the year – both online and in person – to advance GCEC’s chief goals. This includes both updating current programs as well as creating new ones.
One of the more recent initiatives the advisory board has helped push forward is the Virtual Connections program, which seeks to provide more opportunities for GCEC members to meet beyond their annual meetings. The project involves monthly webinars where participants are given the opportunity to interface with program panelists to delve deeper into the topics that the organization is focusing on for that year.
“This is exactly what this advisory board is designed to do,” D’Souza said. “To see how we can get our members engaged in ways that they haven’t been, before.”
D’Souza will be attending his first meeting as a member of the GCEC Executive Advisory Board this October, where he will be brainstorming with members from across the country to develop new programs with the objective of advancing the GCEC mission, as well as adapting existing infrastructure to work under the constraints of the ongoing pandemic.
D’Souza’s appointment as a member of the GCEC Executive Advisory Board is not only an honor for him, but a mark of prestige for all of TCU. It is an official recognition from this global organization of the quality and merit of the university’s entrepreneurship programs, which will now be included as a template to help shape and develop programs for other business schools across the world.
“Being a part of the GCEC board, the premier academic organization for university-based programs across the world, is an honor and validation of the impact of our programs at TCU,” D’Souza said.
